alien from the other side of the world.nIt takes so little to seem learned in the 1980’s. A elericnwho can pull chestnuts of Tertullian out of the cold fire of anseminary education can dine out for a year of after-dinnernspeeches and theological conferences, and an Englishnprofessor able to quote “forsan et haec olim meminisseniuvabit” may find himself in charge of a comparativenliterature curriculum.nThese prodigies of learning, however, must pay a highnprice for their erudition: alienation from less-favored colleagues.nA learned man in a university comes, at length, tonview his situation much as Ovid looked upon his exile innTomis, where the natives made fun of him for speakingnLatin!nProfessional classicists, on the other hand, have littlenreason to be smug. A hundred years ago they were thengatekeepers of the liberal arts, until envy of the newnspecialties drove German and American scholars intonadopting what Jacques Barzun called a “scorched earthnpolicy” towards anything smacking oi belles lettres. At theirnbest, they took too seriously B.L. Gildersleeve’s biblical jokenthat he would rather be a handmaiden in the temple ofnphilology than dwell in the tents of the rhetoricians. At theirnworst, they have bought every ease of outdated snake oil innmodernism’s warehouse. They caught on to Freud and thennew criticism in the 50’s, structuralism in the late 60’s, andnfeminism in the 1970’s. By 1990 they may even discovernastrology and double-knit suits.nHow well I remember some of my colleagues: thenassociate professor of Greek who couldn’t explain indirectndiscourse to his first-year students; the Latinist who wrotenarticles on Catullan echoes in rock music (as in Venus innBluejeans) without knowing anything about popularnmusic—much less Catullus. Those who are, mirabilendictu, competent are sometimes boors who cannot evennfeign an interest in their discipline. (I well remember anrather good ancient historian cheerfully admitting he readnmysteries for pleasure and wouldn’t dream of reading Latinnoff the job.)nOthers with lively minds became devotees of modernnFrench or opera or American history (Garry Wills used tonbe a classicist before he became rich and famous). I donbelieve that a classicist ought to be able to take all humanenlearning as his province, but it is a littie strange how manyngood scholars end up doing other things. In contrast, Inremember great teachers like Douglas Young, who oncenreached down (he was about 6’7″) to declare, “I find classicsninexhaustibly interesting, don’t you”—this from a mannwho had distinguished himself as a poet and politicalnleader, as well as edited the text of Theognis. With greatnpleasure I also recall the youthful enthusiasm of T.R.S.nBroughton, a magisterial student of Roman prosopography.nStupid graduate students sometimes described him as an oldnfogey, but Broughton loved to quote the gags from RomannComedy (which the students never got) or spend hoursnfiguring out the answer to a student’s idle question. WhilenI’m at it, I still also pay tribute to D.F.S. Thompson, whontaught me to appreciate the Latin elegists and whipped usnthrough hundreds of pages of Renaissance neo-Latin that Inshall never—try as I might—forget, and two undergraduatenprofessors—poles apart—who got me started: KiffinnRockwell and Walton Morris, the one an impossiblenteacher and a great inspiration, the other the sort of pedantnwho might well have “settied hoti’s business.” Perhaps it isnbecause their business compels them to rub shoulders withnPlato and Demosthenes. It is hard not to be improved by thenassociation. That is, after all, one of the points in favor ofnthe classical curriculum: It takes very littie for granted.nWhile other more stimulating systems require an inquiringnmind, a lively imagination, or an analytical intelligence,nthe old-fashioned system of “beating Latin” was designed tonwork miracles with the most ordinary boys who resistednenlightenment every step of the way.nThe old system still works. A series of educationalnexperiments conducted in major American cities reveals anbrilliant record of success for Latin programs, particularlynthose aimed at the so-called “disadvantaged.” The mostninteresting results come from a very elementary programnconducted by Rudolph Masciantorio in Philadelphia. Inn1971 Philadelphia public schools conducted a study innwhich fifth-graders were given 15 to 20 minutes of Latin anday. The Latin students were matched with a control groupnselected both for ability and for background. At the end ofnthe school year, the Latin students were one year ahead ofnthe control group on the vocabulary section of the Iowa Testnof Basic Skills. Not surprisingly, Latin enrollment innPhiladelphia rose between 1967 and 1976, from 490 ton14,000 despite a school board attempt to cut the budget.nEqually impressive results have been provided by publicnschools in Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC,nwhere students designated “unfit to learn foreign languages”n(because of prior reading ability) in only one year camen”from behind” to achieve above average achievement innvocabulary and total reading.”nHonesty compels me to admit that classical training doesna great deal to improve even unpromising material. As angroup, classicists are often dull, but they are not asnhopelessly anti-intellectual as the general run of “humanists”nin other departments.nThese inner-city miracles, let me point out, werenachieved with a system of instruction so low-key that thenstudents would never begin to approach proficiency innLatin, no matter how many years they studied. Imaginenwhat could be done with suburban children using thenCambridge Latin Series.nWhy Latin has to be reintroduced is, of course, a boringnstory—a significant part of the long list of misdeedsncommitted by American educators against American families.nTo revert to the question I began with—wherenmodernism went wrong—I shall only note that the declinenin American culture from the age of Irving Babbitt, T.S.nEliot, and Albert Jay Nock to the age of Norman Mailer,nJohn Ashbery, and Martin Peretz coincides exactly with thendecline of the classical curriculum. An educated publicnwould simply not put up with Ancient Evenings or the NewnRepublic in its present form. If you really want to reform thenworld, don’t give money to PAC’s or run guns to Nicaragua.nTeach yourself and your children Latin, or, at least, readnVergil and the Emperor Marcus in translation. You may notnchange the world, but you will change your life.nnn—Thomas FlemingnMARCH 1987 / 9n